SEA OF THIEVES HAS HAD A ROUGH START

If you were like me, and were waiting Sea of Thieves to come out for a long time, we apparently weren't alone. The developers said that they were experiencing "3-4 times more concurrent players than we saw during any scale test or beta session. So far, more than one million unique players have set sail in Sea of Thieves". This incredible overload of the system led to many people (including me) struggling to even get into the game. The matchmaking system was also overloaded and took my friend and I almost an hour to even get into the game. Once in game the problems didn't stop. None of our Reputation from completing voyages was being recorded (but has since been updated) as well as our gold not being awarded, which has also been fixed. The fix at the beginning was basically to not let new players into the game. Which is why a lot of people weren't as lucky as I was.

I don't know if luck is the word though. I watched some people play the beta before playing the game myself and to be honest, it has a very No man's Sky feeling. So much hype that it could never live up to it and game play that makes you question where the rest of it is. The voyages are okay to start and it doesn't give you any pointers to begin with, which is fine by me. After playing the game for about 5 hours now it hasn't gotten much better. The voyages become very chore like very quickly and there are really no big pay offs when they are completed. All the items I have come across in the shops seem purely cosmetic in nature and there are no battle stats to be seen. I did get into 1 fight with another crew while playing...for over 5 hours, and it was definitely the highlight of the night. It was a lot of fun working with my crew to combat this other ship in the open ocean and collect all their loot. About 5 minutes after collecting all their belongings from the ocean it was back to normal voyages.

At this point there seems to be no story line that I have come across other than the stranger in the bar that says I need to get to level 5 reputation will all the Trading companies before he will tell me more. So I will reserve any opinion on that matter for later. It just has left me wanting more. There seems to be no progression or motivation to do anything other than to do it. The goal seems to be get the highest reputation possible but grinding away with voyages will not keep me interested for long if they stay this basic and boring.

There are good things about this game do not get me wrong. The ocean and sky box is beautiful and the ship mechanics as well as the need to depend on your crew while having great communication is a ton of fun and very challenging. Like I said earlier the most fun is had when encountering other players and fighting it out on the open ocean. It happens far to infrequently and the pay off isn't the best.

I have not gotten very far into the game and will continue to play it with the hopes that things start to get a bit more interesting and I will be posting updates on my progression as well as my thoughts on how things are going. I have not encountered a Kraken, nor have I done one of the skeleton raid type quests just yet. There is more fun to be had but it seems just slightly if not mostly incomplete.

Sign of the skeleton raid I have not yet done. I am excited! I Promise!

With that all being said the studio is making quick work of the connection and networking problems from the massive overload of their system and will be pushing patches out as quickly as possible. They say the fastest they will have a patch out will be early next week with multiple maintenance windows to follow.